Monday, 30 September 2013

The Syrian Islamic Front Claim To Have Stopped A Mosque Bombing By Government Agents

Today the following video was posted online by the Syrian Islamic Front

The video shows a brief statement on what the video shows, followed by the confession of one of the men involved

0:08 unnamed man: An Assad’s criminal gang was caught in Idlib. It was sent by the Militrary Security Branch (one of Assad’s various security apparatuses) and was planning to set a number of car bombs in the liberated areas in northern Idlib. They were taken to the Sharia Court. The car bombs were to be put near mosques. The truck bomb was detonated in a remote area.

0:15 I am Alaa’ Muhammed al-Basha (علاء محمد الباشا) from the town of Binnish (بنش). The Military Security Branch in Idilib tempted us by money and gave each one of us SYP 100.000 to park a Kia truck bomb near a mosque in al-Dana (الدانة). The truck was loaded with more than three tons of explosives. (He mentions the same number on the plate of the truck)

0:51 the cameraman explains how the
explosives were hidden in a box made of metal plates and that the
truck looks empty.2:10 he shows the fuse2:35 the truck bomb will be detonated
because it was too difficult to defuse the bomb.

This incident follows another reported series of arrests in the town of Morek (مورك) near Hama on September 24th where it was claimed three men were arrested planting the following devices in an attempt to kill opposition commanders (source)

The use of IEDs by the Syrian army seems to have become increasingly widespread in the past year, with a number of examples being posted online (see here), and it's not the first time a car bomb has been allegedly used to target a mosque, with this example from July 2012. As always, it should be made clear it's difficult to independently verify the claims made the the opposition in these circumstances.

this page is very biased,they don't even try to show neutrality.always 1 side of the picture,1 side photos and videos.for example,this latest video is not military,it's only shown here to make the army look like the terrorists who made the video.this so called islamic front would be called terrorists and criminals if they existed in any other country,but in syria they call them "freedom fighters"there are hundreds of videos showing these terrorists blowing Infrastructure,Infrastructure and holy places yet we see here 1 fake video with no proof of anything.shame on you

This blog just posts things, they don't speak Arabic. They've not been to Syria either. The Hama incident for example on September 24th the sub-text of the 'liquidation' statement reads as a sectarian torture killing. It looks like a horrifying torture killing for recreational purposes, so wrong religion, wrong place, wrong time. The bomb stuff is a post-mortem insult by the killers to their murder victims.

It was reported that alCIAda unloaded that very same truck for the Syrian Islamic Front in front of my Citibank last Tuesday. They were said to have thrown 6,000 pounds of human organs onto a dolly and it was believed that they then went to the park, reportedly grilling them up using PUBLIC grills, according to unnamed unverified sources.

Can you believe that shit? Pretty tasteless if you ask me. But they insist it's delicious, it is said.

i will not be surprised if we hear in the next days or so a mosques bombing... they really need to Raises a curse of Sunni supporters of the Assad, since they have no chance for them to go to Geneva 2 without the majority of the Syrian ppl with them

they used since more than 2 years to start them actions from media news all in one subject on all channels at the same time over and over and over then we see what was that for after days or weeks or months.

"This incident follows another reported series of arrests in the town of Morek (مورك) near Hama on September 24th where it was claimed three men were arrested planting the following devices in an attempt to kill opposition commanders"

The insurgents tortured those people terribly. Their bodies were covered in horrifying torture wounds. Why should any civilized person believe anything such people say?

I have read this blog for a while and initially I thought it was an interesting and well-documented source of evidence on the weaponry employed in the fighting in Syria. Over time, however, I have come to realize that it suffers from a series of biases: both in terms of the items selected for reporting, and in terms of how these items are described. The blogger would be well served by reading up on some of the literature on "confirmation bias", i.e., the innate human tendency to seek out information that confirms an already held belief.

The regime operative narrative, instead read unfortunates captured by sectarian bandits. The Morek, Hama atrocity, for example, the insurgents were apologetic for the delay in the publication of confessions of the three people who were 'liquidated' because they tortured and mutilated them for 24 hours and then posted the photographs of their depraved handiwork to Facebook, and then this blog links to the thing in question.

What one has are people constantly taking revenge for the Hama massacre in 1982, and that usually means victimizing Alawites or minorities.

Whilst being naturally sceptical of Syrian Islamic Front claims, is there a body of evidence for your counter-narrative?

This sort of thing, innocent people being grabbed and tortured into false confessions, is very often true in this sort of situation, but I'm uncomfortable to be told it's all lies and that people were tortured, without sight of some sort of material to back it up.

The bombs do seem to have existed, and might indeed have originated with the Assad regime, espeically if the truck bomb really was well engineered and very hard to spot. The guilt or innocence of any suspects seized is another matter and a few sources would be nice.

And the blog author is very clear that he's presenting an unverified claim, so some of the orchestrated criticism of his "bias" one way and another is somewhat carping.

They use the word liquidated. The photo of the dumped bodies on a traffic roundabout has the text. It took a while to get confessions out of them. If you follow the link supplied on this blog. The mutilated bodies speaks for the case. One of the victims has been hung like a pig from a joist or something. Also, whipping with wire by the look of it. Infection has a good start, twelve to eighteen or so hours.

Someone being compelled to drive a truck bomb to a target under the duress of threats to kill his entire family, who he knew to be hostage at the time, is by no means unprecedented, and even the IRA tried that trick out, once.

(I think it was more than their own nationalist community could take, to be honest, because it didn't happen again. In any event, the Irishman concerned drove the truck to a police station, but shouted warnings as he approached.)

Al Qaeda has a long track record of using mentally-handicapped persons to deliver suicide bombs, too. We need a bit more evidence in both directions, really, to be sure what happened.

Most of such videos by the opposition are fabricated, the first professional series being the hospital torture genre. They make them in batches.

Sometimes the PR gets mixed up, so a school used as insurgent bomb factory, goes out with a (shock horror) regime strike on a school, even the same school. In one such case a school was being used to eliminate the last of the Alawites at al-Bab, near Aleppo, when a direction came down to release an Alawitre prisoner for a western newspaper.

I think they killed the release prop later of course, I don't think he was really released. They certainly tortured and murdered the rest. Anyway so the Alawites were hung on hooks or metal bed frames, and that had to be tidied up before the western journalist arrived for his story.